How Did East Asians Become Yellow?

In their earliest encounters with East Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people
of China and Japan as white, yet by the end of the seventeenth century the category of
whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become "yellow" in the
Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, this talk will explore the notion of
yellowness and show that the label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions,
but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race. The conceptual
relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western
readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that
described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well
as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once
East Asians were lumped together as members of the "Mongolian race" they began to be
considered yellow.